A story
published today in the Houston chronicle observes that every time Grace McCabe is handed a form in
a doctor's office asking for an emergency contact, the blank space makes
her shiver.

It is such a simple question for anyone with a spouse, partner or
children. But McCabe, a 75 year-old New Yorker, has always lived alone.
Who could she rely on in a crisis? Who would be there for her in the
worst of times?

These were once hypothetical questions.
Now McCabe's slowly fading eyesight is almost gone.

She has always had lots of friends but
had never asked one to take responsibility for her, to answer the
middle-of-the-night telephone call from the emergency room, say, or to
pay her bills because she cannot write checks herself.

Of all her friends, she has fixed on one
with a good heart, a steady hand under pressure and a talent for problem
solving. So time and again, she writes "Charlotte Frank" in the blank
space and lightens the moment by calling to say, "Charlotte, you're on
another list."

"You find out there are good friends who
become great friends," McCabe said.

"Charlotte told me to 'grab on,' both
literally and figuratively, and I did."

There is no way to calculate how many
Americans of all ages living alone happen to be sick or disabled, but
hospital discharge planners and home health care agencies say they are
serving more single people who have no obvious person to look after
them.

The growing number of single-person
households — including the never-married, divorced and widowed — is
evident in census reports. In 2003, nearly 27 percent of U.S. households
consisted of one person living alone, up from 18 percent in 1970,
putting a premium on friendship, a relationship without the legal status
or social standing of kin. And demographers warn that as baby boomers
gray, the ranks of single-person households will swell, with illness and
disability an inevitable corollary of age.